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Malloy’s austerity budget a disaster for Connecticut…

Governor Dannel Malloy is blasting the legislature for talking about additional revenue to help fund critically important services.

Although Malloy’s budget relies on increasing taxes for poor and middle-class families and shifting $400 million onto the backs of local property taxpayers, he is claiming that the solution to Connecticut’s fiscal crisis is his budget plan.

Malloy’s continued refusal to ensure the rich are paying their fair share means poorer and middle income families are suffering on both the tax and expenditure side of the budget.

As CT Voices explains;

The Governor’s Budget would reduce the Earned Income Tax Credit, remove parents from HUSKY A, eliminate property tax support for the lower and middle classes, keep young children out of Care 4 Kids funded child care, and cut municipal aid to 141 towns. Statewide, proposed cuts to the EITC and the property tax credit are equal to a tax increase of $93 for low-income families and $157 for middle-income families.

CT Voices adds;

Many of the Governor’s cost-savings proposals target the same groups of low- to middle-income families.

For example, a single mother with two children making $30,000 per year would lose her health insurance, be unable to enroll her children in Care4Kids, and could see a tax increase of $93. A single parent working for $12 per hour with a child would also lose her health insurance at the same time the state restricts her access to child care and increases her taxes.

In response to the Governor’s outrageous budget proposal, some Connecticut legislators are talking about increasing the tax rate on high income earners in Connecticut.

Remember, in Connecticut, the poor pay about 12% of their income in state and local taxes, the middle class about 10% of their income in state and local taxes and the rich only pay about 5.5% of their income in state and local taxes.

Connecticut has created a regressive tax structure that unfairly hurts lower and middle income families.

It is time for Connecticut’s legislators to stand up to Malloy’s bullying tactics and move forward with a tax reform proposal that will not dump the burden on lower and middle income families while shifting even more onto the backs of local property taxpayers.

we both know this budget is DOA. They’ll be a town revolt if the towns have to pick up $400 million in pension costs, they never had a say in. The rest of it to wave the red flag that the cuts will hurt the poor and it does. But that is to get the voters to go ahead with tax increases.
Chris Powell of the Journal Enquirer had some great ideas.

— Repealing collective bargaining for government employees and the
binding arbitration of their contracts, laws that put most state and
municipal government expense outside the ordinary democratic process and
give the compensation of government employees priority over all other
undertakings in government.

— Getting state government out of the pension
business, which has placed huge unfunded liabilities on the state
because elected officials can never bring themselves to appropriate
adequately for the grand benefits they like to promise to government
employees.

— Eliminating the six minor paid holidays
enjoyed by state and municipal employees but not private-sector
employees, holidays like Columbus Day.

– Ending welfare for childbearing outside
marriage, the great generator of poverty, child neglect, and dependence
on government.

— Eliminating social promotion in public
education, which has created vast inflation in spending as illiterates
are graduated from high school and promoted to remedial courses in
public colleges, devaluing college degrees, which today may signify no
more learning than high school diplomas signified 50 years ago.
— Prohibiting corporate welfare, whereby any sizable company is able to extort money from state government.
— And repealing drug criminalization, which causes most expense in the criminal-justice system without reducing drug abuse.
I would add a review of every job and agency for need, duplication and salary level. We can’t afford a state govt where employees make 25% more than private sector workers.
If is amazing how fast Malloy became a cutter after he didn’t need the unions for re-elction.

buygoldandprosper

Dan Malloy was a failure as a mayor and is now a failure as a governor. He will walk out of Hartford financially secure thanks in part to Cathy’s gig at GHAC and eight years of not having to pay a mortgage,insurance,car payments,gas,registration and all the fees and taxes that he has imposed on the state residents. A free trip to Davos as well!
He has left us all more unsafe,trimming costs by emptying the prisons.
He has kicked the can down the road so future generations will be burdened by debt and he used every gimmick he could,until he ran out of options.
It was all spin from the get-go. Very much like Trump, Danny surrounded himself with flunkies that could not find work elsewhere. Ben Barnes is his number one flunkie!
Today’s tax receipt news is just another red flag.

4H

I find it crazy, inside-out, upside-down, backwards and bizarre that it’s the policy of the federal government, Connecticut state government, and many other states who are playing into the increasing income inequity to protect the economic interests of the rich. The Connecticut economy needs to be revved up, and that’s not going to be accomplished by protecting the rich, while banging it to non-wealthy residents. Putting more money & leaving more money in the pockets of the rich will neither trickle-down or rev up the economy. The rich are too greedy to make supply-side economics work.

jschm

Put on the 19% hedge fund tax the unions want and watch them leave with their jobs, tax payments and all the affects of them being here. France put a 70% tax on the rich and the rich left the country. Why is this every Democrats answer when it has been a proven failure and the only answer is to cut spending.

John Mosey

The problem is cutting costs votes.

4H

What I said is still correct. In 1980, Art Laffer started a revolution that would create a Frankenstein, which is the oligarchy, and their puppet elected officials who makes the rules to help them. In 1973, the upper one-percenters owned 7% of the economy, currently the upper one-percenters own 25% of the economy, and according to you, the more the rich own, (and they will), the better off we are as an American society. We have painted ourselves in a corner, the more the oligarchy have, the more they want, and they will use whatever leverage they have to get their way. The cry baby rich are winning. In Connecticut, it’s easy for grandma to pay over 20% of her income to property tax, car tax, sales tax, gross receipt taxes, and other consumer taxes and fees, while the rich pay 8% or less. We must lower taxes on the rich while they grant us our 1% pay increases. Sounds fair to me.